Wi-Fi Protected Access II (WPA2) Handshake Vulnerabilities

Purpose

The purpose of this alert is to bring attention to multiple critical vulnerabilities in WPA2, a protocol that secures all modern protected Wi-Fi networks.

Assessment

CCIRC has become aware of multiple critical vulnerabilities in WPA2 handshake traffic. These vulnerabilities can be manipulated to induce nonce and session key reuse which could result in key reinstallation by a wireless access point or client. This could then enable arbitrary packet decryption and injection, TCP connection hijacking, HTTP content injection, or the replay of unicast, broadcast, and multicast frames.

As these vulnerabilities are in the Wi-Fi standard, they are not related to individual products or their implementation. However, the correct implementation of the WPA2 protocol is likely affected.

The WPA2 protocol is affected by the following vulnerabilities:

CVE-2017-13077: Reinstallation of the pairwise encryption key (PTK-TK) in the 4-way handshake.

CVE-2017-13078: Reinstallation of the group key (GTK) in the 4-way handshake.

CVE-2017-13079: Reinstallation of the integrity group key (IGTK) in the 4-way handshake.

CVE-2017-13080: Reinstallation of the group key (GTK) in the group key handshake.

CVE-2017-13081: Reinstallation of the integrity group key (IGTK) in the group key handshake.

References

Note to Readers

In support of Public Safety's mission to build a safe and resilient Canada, CCIRC's mandate is to help ensure the security and resilience of the vital non-federal government cyber systems that underpin Canada's national security, public safety and economic prosperity. As Canada's computer security incident response team, CCIRC is Canada's national coordination centre for the prevention and mitigation of, preparedness for, response to, and recovery from cyber incidents on non-federal government systems. It does this by providing authoritative advice and support, and coordinating information sharing and incident response.